I am laying next to our sleeping baby, who is about 6 months old. (He is our first and will likely be our only) I was terribly concerned about the lack of sleep as a first time father. Besides hearing “congratulations” when we told people we were pregnant, a close second was “sleep now, while you can.” We have had Very few “rough nights,” if you can even call it that, and for the last 5.5 months, my only sleep deprivation is almost exclusively self inflicted. We credit 1) our amazing baby, who seems to know that nighttime is for sleeping or eating only, and 2) that he sleeps with us in our bed.(Queue horrific gasps.)

He is breastfed, and still wakes up about 3 times during his 12 hours of sleep every night to breastfeed. However, that consists of him making minimal noise, and my wife either picking him up or rolling over and feeding him while they lay next to each other. They literally both sleep through most feedings. For his first few weeks of life, he simply slept on her breast, so it was even easier.

Honestly, after experiencing and witnessing this arrangement, I can’t imagine that nature had moms and babies doing anything differently for the last few thousand years. Our lives would have been more difficult if we had him in a separate room right now. If that was our arrangement, we could count on waking up to loud cries and walking to another room multiple times a night, and either comforting or feeding our baby, and then walking back to bed afterwards. If we were doing that, I think folks’ warnings would have been true.

This was not our plan, but it became our plan after having a very strong instinct to stay close to our newborn when we brought him home.

I used to think that we were significantly endangering our child with bed sharing, but then I found these articles from the Mother-Baby sleep lab at Notre Dame : http://cosleeping.nd.edu/articles-and-presentations/articles...

We don’t fit any of the risk factors associated with SIDS in bedsharing (drug or alcohol use, obesity, smoking, etc), and thus consider it statistically safe enough that the benefits far outweigh the risks. YMMV, but I recommend reading one or two of those articles/papers to balance out the blanket warnings against bed sharing that you will inevitably hear if you live in the US.

Enjoy parenthood. It’s been the best experience of our lives.